Friday, February 09, 2007

WHERE WAS I? As usual, it's in one of the five boroughs. This time around, there will be no visual clues. Leave your guesses in the comments section...and score a bonus point if you get it in the first twenty guesses or if you get the correct answer on Valentine's Day.

This is not a guess but a response to Dolph taken from the About Blogger page.

The Story of Blogger

Blogger was started by a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs in August of 1999. This was in the midst of the dot-com boom. But we weren't exactly a VC-funded, party-throwing, foosball-in-the-lobby-playing, free-beer-drinking outfit. (Unless it was other people's free beer.)

We were three friends, funded by doing annoying contract web projects for big companies, trying to make our own grand entrance onto the Internet landscape. What we were originally trying to do doesn't matter so much now. But while doing it, we created Blogger, more or less on a whim, and thought — Hmmm... that's kinda interesting.

Blogger took off, in a small way, and eventually a bigger way, over a couple years. We raised a little money (but stayed small). And then the bust happened, and we ran out of money, and our fun little journey got less fun. We narrowly survived, not all in one piece, but kept the service going the whole time (most days) and started building it back up.

Things were going well again in 2002. We had hundreds of thousands of users, though still just a few people. And then something no one expected happened: Google wanted to buy us. Yes, that Google

We liked Google a lot. And they liked blogs. So we were amenable to the idea. And it worked out nicely.

Now we're a small (but slightly bigger than before) team in Google focusing on helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world's information from the personal perspective. Which has pretty much always been our whole deal.

Were you at the H.W. Wilson Company? I think that is the building you see that has a lighthouse on its roof. I couldn't tell if it was below 163rd St or actually on it from Google maps, but I'll make the guess anywho.

Well, my Bathgate guess was based upon my Hagstrom's map which shows Bathgate extending both above and below the Cross Bronx (down into the mid 160's). However, I have discovered on many an occasion the atlas to be wrong and as I don't know the Bronx well, you could be very well right.

No chickens this time, Scott--at least as far as I remember--but definitely two parrots.

You see, Dolph is correct: I was at the Bronx Museum of Arts (on the Grand Concourse) for Tropicália, an exhibition about a Brazilian cultural movement associated with the late Sixties and early Seventies. I started to take a picture of one Antonio Dias artwork in particular (with Valentine's Day in mind), but an otherwise friendly and helpful security guard intervened. Since then, I have contacted the museum for more info but I haven't heard back.

The two parrots were part of the playful installation-sandbox Tropicália (1967), by Hélio Oiticica.